Digital Delirium May
By: Sean Axmaker |
Sunday June 26, 2005 |
| Recent DVD releases of the sometimes obscure, underrated, and overlooked. This month, strut into the "Soul Showcase," dig on some sci-fi, and stare down the international hit 800 Bullets |
Larry Yust's Trick Baby (Universal), a forgotten film of the seventies, was quietly released a couple of months ago as part of Universal's "Soul Showcase." It's a more polite title than blaxploitation, but it essentially means the same thing. And in this case it's wrong. This confidence drama set on the streets of Philadelphia is charged with issues of race, racism, family, and trust in ways that no other blaxploitation film touches on. White Folks (Kiel Martin), a young, charismatic white man, is the son in all but blood of Blue (Mel Stewart), a veteran hustler adopted the orphaned son of a black hooker and her white John, a "trick baby," as child. Since Folks takes on the shading of his anonymous father, they make a perfect team -- Blue masterminds the cons, Folks charms the moneyed white marks, and they clean up a series of small-time cons using the race card as their lever. Think of it as a street-level Sting with a brilliant hook, but where Redford's black partner is killed off in the opening minutes so he can slide into an all-white cast, Folks is the odd-man-out here, treated like a outcast in the African American community that embraces Blue, just because his shading isn't right. The words father, son, and love are never uttered by the men, but their relations can be nothing. When they sting a chump connected to the mob and their community turns its back on them, the powerful bond between them is the only thing that remains constant. Yust's direction is perfect for the film -- straightforward, unsentimental, pragmatic -- and he draws excellent performances from both Martin and Stewart. You can feel their love the game in every con as well as their unspoken devotion to one another. The disc looks good and is letterboxed at 1.85:1.
 John Mills plays the crusty British scientist Bernard Quatermass and he's become angry and disillusioned with global politics and social hypocrisy as poverty and crime run rampant (the opening scenes look like something out of Romero's original Dawn of the Dead) and the counterculture turns to a mystic cult, guided by a primitive drive out of the urban gang-war zones and into the country. What makes this different is when they throngs are transported from the face of the Earth by some searing alien force -- it's either a secular version of the Rapture or an interstellar magnifying glass on the human ant farm -- and Quatermass turns to a dispossessed group of oldsters to solve the mystery. Director Piers Haggard makes the most of his limited budget with a few awesome, eerily desolate set pieces (his attempts at epic scale are less successful but forgivable) and paces the show well, rarely letting the tone of terror and atmosphere of complete social breakdown falter even when the performances do. Largely, however, he simply lets Kneale ideas captivate the viewers. The visible film grain and the slightly drained-looking colors of the transfer are true to the British telefilms of the period. A&E's 2-disc edition features the feature length cut The Quatermass Conclusion and the History Channel documentary Enduring Mystery of Stonehenge. 
In Robert S. Fiveson's paranoid thriller Clonus (briefly released as Parts: The Clonus Horror, 1979) (Mondo Macabro), a small cadre of Olympic caliber athletes are raised in an isolated compound that looks like a cross between a holiday resort fortress and a modern-day sports camp for Aryan youth. Drilled, trained, fed, and intellectually numbed into a state of blissful ignorance and eager obedience, they are adult orphans under paternal care and bred for one purpose only: parts for organ harvest.
Richard (Tim Donnelly) is the maverick who begins to question the vague and contradictory explanations that his "guides" and doctors feed him, like an impatient parent to a child. He breaks out of his secret compound to find answers in the outside world of America that he only knows as an idealistic paradise. While his curiosity is charged, his intellect is still childlike, which is one of the clever twists of this surprisingly savvy little indie film, which is more topical today, in the age of stem cell research and the national dialogue of the moral repercussions of cloning, than it was when it was made. But more insidious than the political future-shock questions of definitions of humanity is the convincing atmosphere of uneasy, almost willing oppression that Fiveson creates on his starvation budget. This industrial campus world, where human clones are bred to be stupid, blindly obedient, and unquestioning of authority, becomes a sickly satirical parody of the free world. The DVD transfer is clean and good looking and the disc features commentary by director Robert S. Fiveson, an interesting 40 minute interview featurette with director Fiveson, and trailers.  The film name-checks western directors and iconic screen heroes and tosses in a number of familiar faces in small roles (R.G. Armstrong, Leo Gordon, and Geoffrey Lewis among them). Ennio Morricone's eclectic score bounces between the childlike opening song and dramatic themes that recall his classic Leone compositions, filling the otherwise spare soundtrack of footsteps, horse hooves, jangling spurs, gunfire cracks, and the lonely wind. The widescreen transfer looks good and there are no extras. 
Spanish genre director Alex de Iglesia brings the spaghetti western up to date with 800 Bullets (TLA), a tribute to the magic of movies and moviemaking set and shot in Almeria, Spain (home to scores of sixties westerns). Sancho Gracia is a grizzled old movie stuntman who acts out his glory days for a trickle of tourists who come to the clapboard spaghetti western theme park that he has made his home, along with a rag-tag collection of former character actors and stuntmen.
When his grandson runs away from home and joins him in his western neverland, his embittered daughter-in-law (Carmen Maura) buys up the land and closes down the park and the old cowboy rouses his fellow has-beens to their own version of the Mexican revolution: six-guns and dynamite against modern Spanish cops. Iglesia's style is pitch perfect, from the widescreen imagery in washes of bright sun-blanched color and freeze frame editing to the evocative graphic design and Morricone-esque score in the opening and closing credits. But the macho, devil-may-care attitude of the old men is tempered by their life of irresponsible fantasy and the reckless damage they've caused by living out their dreams at the expense of their loved ones. The satirical fun of a movie revolution played out in real life as a last gasp of independence carries a fatal price. The DVD features The Making of 800 Bullets, galleries of behind-the-scenes and production stills, and the trailer. |
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